Posted
by
kdawsonon Sunday September 20, 2009 @10:29PM
from the something's-gained-and-something's-lost dept.

antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a fewtimes before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"

Not "die a death", but be quietly put into a retirement home. There are still people who can do copperplate engraving (and I mean egraving, not just the handwriting style), which is great as a historic craft but has little real-world use. I think cursive handwriting is in the same boat, to be relegated to specialist calligraphers.

Cursive has a very specific application, it's a continuous script that keeps spotting to a minimum when using an ink stylus with minimal or no regulation (think quills and fountain pens). That makes it obsolete from a technical standpoint. It's not supposed to be more legible, and it makes flourishes a bit easier to incorporate because it looks like they belong. Printing is pragmatic and it's faster. Cursive script would be best taught in an art class these days. When speed writing (such as taking notes), I either type or print. While I still can write in the cursive script I learned in elementary school, even I can hardly decipher my own cursive if I've scrawled it down fast. Print writing, at least in my case, is far more legible even if hurried.

No it was me that had an "ask slashdot" article published regarding "is typing ruining my ability to spell" Many people responded to which I am very thankful for and I it was quite enlightening. As with the publisher of this post, it is an issue that is not going to go away. I have been taking personal steps to undue or reverse engineer these issues.
I started to practice my hand-writing skills all over again. Wrote some letters to some people on Conqueror Paper with watermarks and posted them in hand-written envelopes.
The reaction has been incredible instead of typed words. A hand written letter makes a person feel special. Interestingly enough I also found out that people switch off mentally with a printed or electronic communication.
Where am I going with this? Well SAS Special Air Service and SBS Special Boat Service, call in "Air Strikes" manually with manual co-ordinates to get things right. We never trust GPS or lasers. There are only a few pilots who we call in over after ISTAR on AWACS following radio silence, that can override on board weapons systems to hit the right target without electronic intervention.
Therefore, doing everything manually has a place in society. We all need some downtime from digital lives we lead. They have benefits, but digital can be a curse.
So/MOTD is re-explore your life, go out and enjoy your life and teach your kids you can be creative with manual hand-writing or anything manual.

I dont care to read it, and i hated writing with it. i could probably manage to use it, more or less, if i had to, but its been many, many years since i had to.

I also don't care to read or write curseive writing. Yet, it shows up all the time on/. Just mention RIAA, patents, traffic shaping, Microsoft, etc. and you see all sorts of f-bombs and other forms of curseive writing in comment after comment. It makes me sad. I'm glad that you have gone for many years without resorting to such tired-out shock devices.

I have a C&R FFL that requires a bound logbook. I also have a private pilots license which I use a paper logbook for as well.

I've not written a bit of cursive in either. Print works fine in them. To tell the truth, aside from my signature, I haven't written a word of cursive since they stopped requiring students write in it (which was around the 7th grade or so - about 15 years ago).

The thing with "doesn't matter to me" is that opinion on cursive writing is always going to be polarised. On a forum like Slashdot there's usually no point even raising the issue. The forum is largely populated with philistines who couldn't give a fuck about anything as individual as handwriting.
OK, I guess I made my own position clear enough in the last sentence. Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard.
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.

That's what non-cursive writing (printing) is for. It's much more legible to people other than the writer.

What does writing in cursive have to do with power outages or blackouts? Do power outages cripple your hands? You can't write using standard hand writing? I find this cursive-worship a lot of people have to be completely arbitrary and silly. Do you hunt and kill and butcher all of your own food? Do you make and can all of your own fruits and vegetables and preserves? Do you skin and tan your own leather clothing? Do you use kerosene lamps? Do you own a horse instead of a car for transportation?

Of course not. There is no inherent value in something simply because it is old or because it is tradition.

Cursive is intended as a smoother, quicker, easier-on-the-hand form of writing. If you write a hell of a lot by hand, it can be very necessary to speed things up and keep your hand from cramping. However, it has been a couple of decades since most people actually needed to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write reams of content in a single sitting. Writing is largely for notes and lists these days and we use devices -- computer, etc -- for anything of great length. It's faster and less stressful on the hand (I say this as a person who grew up wanting to be a writer and therefore producing hundreds upon hundreds of pages of sheets full of cursive-written material and frequently had a very pained hand as a result).

If we were talking the death of hand writing, that's one thing. It's a fundamental necessity to be able to know how to, among other things, write your damn name. Or leave a note on someone's car when you scratch it with a shopping cart. Or write a thoughtful note to a loved one. But the death of cursive? Meh. So what. What about short-hand? Morse code? Olde English?

And yes, this whole article already appeared on Slashdot like a month ago.

While you call this important body of knowledge valueless, I do not and can do the things you describe. So therefor when and if the balloon goes up, my family will eat and be clothed while yours will starve and die naked in the cold. What a pitty.

You... hunt your own food... in Oakland. And tan your own leather? By the light of kerosene lamps. To wear on your horse while you ride to Burning Man. I think you'll be dead long before any of that is an issue. If it is an issue, I don't think you'll feed your family with cursive writing, man.

Cursive is fine, but it will never replace Insular Majiscule for grandeur, so important to getting one's point across (especially important if you're 1300 years old or so). I do enjoy the hip-hop trendiness of Carolingean Miniscule with it's clever serifs and ligatures, but nothing will replace Gothic Littera Bastarde for those elegant, impassioned invitations to the A-list on your parties (well, SCA events anyway). But don't skimp on the illumination, either, or valuable content may not be appropriately highlighted.

I'm always kind of confused by the argument, which continually crops up, that cursive writing is resistant to technological failure. Printing, as in non-cursive writing, is exactly as resistant to blackouts, viruses, malware, and spyware; and additionally it is more closely related to the skill of reading machine-text. It is also open to some individuality. Also, you need a light source to read even during a blackout:).

Cursive writing may well be an artform, but there are a lot of arts that don't get nearly the attention as cursive writing, and it's unclear to me that it deserves such special treatment. I think I had 5 days where we touched on calligraphy for about 40 minutes each day, in my entire childhood. Meanwhile, cursive was a repeated theme. I think even a non-philistine can argue for something other than slavishly fighting the tide of history to maintain cursive as a national lingua franca. It's not like we're saying we'd rather the time be spent making fart jokes.

And I do, in fact, use cursive writing from time to time. It's a matter of encoding specificity -- if I'm writing long-form paragraphs, I naturally go to cursive, because in elementary and high school you'd fail if you print on an essay or paragraph answer; if I'm scribbling single words or interjections in mathematical sequences, or generally if I'm writing on a whiteboard, I print.

Cursive was invented because printing is wasteful of space. Cursive is much more compact (when done correctly). It is also faster to produce. To me, these are the only arguments that matter in handwriting - am I wasting time and other resources for no gain?

Print serves a purpose, and is valuable, but only a fool wastes on the theory that there's always plenty. Space and time are always premium. It may be harder to read bad cursive, but then why produce bad cursive?

> Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard.

I just want to throw this out there: Left handed people cannot easily use these implements, nor the common (i.e. right handed) stoke patterns and techniques.

Fountain pens generally only function on 'pull' strokes; when pushing, the nib neds to catch on the paper, and there is minimal ink flow. This isn't a major issue when writing right-handed because the text flows to the right, just making the average stroke a 'pull'. Left handed writers, naturally, are 'pushing' most of the time. There are other problems as well, such as smearing the fresh ink, etc.

Of course, with the proper training (e.g. rotating the paper at an odd angle) and tools (e.g. nibs cut at opposite angles), these can be overcome. However, it is still significantly more difficult for a left hander to learn, and at only 10% of the population, there's not enough incentive to teach them in a mixed environment (e.g. school).

Point being, you can count the better part of all left handers saying "doesn't matter to me" simply because they are ill-equipped, not because they are "philistines".

I'm left-handed. In school, I found that my writing tended to become illegible rather quickly, because of having to `push' rather than `pull' across the paper.

One day, I was browsing in a bookshop when I noticed a facsimile of some of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. Now, everyone knows that he wrote his personal notes backwards, and writing backwards is often a sign of left-handedness. And since da Vinci hacked on just about everything else going in Renaissance Italy, I wondered whether he might have hacked his own handwriting for ease of use. And he must have had to write to other people occasionally --- he couldn't ALWAYS have written backwards.

So I bought the book and with a mirror and a magnifying-glass figured out how he formed his letters. And I found that actually, his handwriting is very easy when writing left-to-right. I think that most of the ease comes from replacing difficult `pushed' curves with straight lines wherever possible. For example, using a small capital N rather than n, using a small captial A rather than a, forming g like a modern cursive z, and so on. Other improvements appear to have been made for speed, such as not dotting i or j. Other decisions appear to have been made to slow the hand down briefly but regularly; for example, writing capitals large, and with curves.

So I adopted his ways of forming letters, and found that I could write quicker, more fluidly, and without much of the hand-cramp from which I used to suffer. A decade later, I still use his handwriting.

Forget cursive - the whole world's been going to hell ever since they eliminated mandatory cuniform tablet-carving in the 30s. And don't get me started about the sad state of papyrus making in America's schools...

That is a funny and in a way, prescient thought. I for one believe that not only is cursive on the outs, but our current form of expression of text as well; though on a somewhat longer time scale. We may be headed full circle back towards some form of iconographic means of communication, indeed like a system of hieroglyphics.

Hasn't the internet seen a proliferation of images and video and a transition from long texts to bloggable and twitterable "bits" of text? Are we headed in the "Western World" toward a different symbology? Consider Chinese Script or Japanese or some of the other Asian scripts which are, after a fashion, more wholly iconographic.

"A 'picture' is worth a thousand words"

Is it feasible that we are heading toward a new style of the consolidation of information? When was the last time you read a 1000 page book? Are Universities graduating more Literature majors or more Graphic Designers? Just a thought...

--

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.

A legal signature doesn't need to be anything, though. It doesn't even have to be your name, for goodness sake (mine, for the longest time, was not my name at all, in fact) and it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.

And what font to you use when you are writing a check out in your checkbook?And what font will you use when you sign legal documents? Make a bix "X"?

No, no matter what font, you still need a legal signature that is not computer generated?

No you don't. "This application [belgium.be] will allow you to electronically sign documents by means of your electronic identity card (eID). First of all, the document you selected will be converted into a PDF document. Then, it will be signed electronically by means of your eID. "

Drawing tends to result in stick figures, painting often causes people to apply paint outside the lines, playing an instrument results in dissonance, and dancing, well, that just makes people look silly.

If that's your argument, I'd suggest you re-examine your view of the arts. To be fair, though, I suspect you've never seen beautiful handwriting, or its effect on the addressee.

I learned standard cursive in grade school. Typing I learned in high school. Classes in architecture and engineering taught me the value of "printing". In later years, I took up calligraphy (all forms) and modified my own handwriting, moving from "cursive" to an italic.

Throughout all those years, I never questioned the value or the utility of what I was learning, or the work required to master it, typing included. Does that mean I can stick to using a keyboard for all forms of communication? Sure. But I but don't. Life is much richer (for everyone involved) when you don't opt for the lowest common denominator. In that sense, it's a lot like like music. Why learn to play when you can just buy it and have your computer play it?

A handwritten note or letter, irrespective of whether it's to a girlfriend you're looking to woo, a boss you want to thank, an interviewer you want to impress, or to a family member with whom you want to share something personal, is far more effective (and meaningful) than a piece of paper spit out of a laserjet printer.

Are you seriously comparing the WAY somebody writes something and the way a painter paints? I've read a lot of literature, some great, some seriously overrated, and it was always typed. Even Shakespeare, the god damn grandfather of modern literature, was all conveyed to me through text printed in a uniform manor on some time of printing machine of some sort, not by a human being's strokes on a page.

Some writers might prefer to write their novels with a pen, but they don't submit the story to their publisher that way.

Heh. Way to illustrate the GP's point. Shakespeare's works are meant to be seen and heard in the theater, not read on some shitty reprint with cliffnotes that you bought from Penguin press for $5.

True calligraphy requires an amazing amount of skill, practice, and artistry to produce consistent and attractive writing... all while focusing on what you want to say. And remember this is done in ink, with a nib that an untrained person would have a hard time writing legible text with, and there is

But then you're comparing cursive to an art, and I agree with that. But as an art is isn't "needed" per se, but to satisfy an urge to see "beautiful" things. Yeah, drawings tend to result in stick figures and people can paint outside the lines, but you don't read those, you just look at them. When it comes to writing, you're communicating something in a different way art does. You want it to be clear for others to read, and everybody should read the same (we're not going into the complexity of if they actua

Cursive writing is no more a useful skill than illuminating manuscripts. Certainly, one should be able to write with a pen or pencil; but cursive letterforms are of dubious advantage with modern writing implements.

Supposedly it is faster, however that doesn't matter since typing is by far faster still. Other than that, there are no advantages. Cursive is harder to read, which is who we don't use it as a standard font on computers. Computers these days could do a fine job of making actual cursive (properly joining the letters and all that) if we wanted but we don't. A good proportional block font is much easier to read, so that is what is used. Cursive isn't just a pain to write, it is a pain to read too.

We should be teaching kids to emulate computerized type in penmanship to the extent possible. Make your letters as clear as possible, not frilly. If speed is an issue because you've a lot of text to commit to paper, then get a computer and type it out. Because I don't care how fast your script is, I can type faster. Write for maximum legibility, not for some dead style.

From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?

Eh, more likely they were just blindsided by the sudden availability of word processors and really did think you'd have to hand-write everything indefinitely far into the future.

I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster. I finally figured out, that I could write tons faster without it. Then I learned how to type. Occasionally, I still break it out, but by and large, I won't miss its passing. Cursive's only real purpose, I think, is the highly stylized version: Calligraphy.

I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster.

It isn't faster, it's easier. They may not have called it anything more than "writer's cramp", but RSI existed much longer than the common medical term of today. Remember that it wasn't the speed with which they wrote that was the problem, but - having fewer alternatives - a clerical job meant you were writing for bloody ever, day after day.

Here's an experiment someone could try if they wanted. Take a day's work, steady writing by hand, and copy it out using printed block style hand print. Do the same thing (after a good rest, or whatever other controls you can add) using cursive writing, connected ascenders and descenders and all. Track each effort with a wristband (or IR thermography, whatever works best) that measures the amount of heat your fingers, wrist and forearm generate over the same amount of time. Add this to subjective feelings - which was easier on you, at the end of the day? Cursive, every time. That's what it evolved for.

However, it's also quite clear that things that evolved from purely utilitarian uses become cultural artifacts, and very beautiful. Check BoingBoing or DarkRoastedBlend sites for some recent photos of restored or old rusted equipment. With the right perspective it becomes art.

"But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print. "

I don't really understand. There seem to be two kind of handwriting competing for the written part, but I have never seen that in classes. Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ? In France we learn it and then quickly forget it to only write cursive.

Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ?

Why would it take ages? I abandoned cursive writing as soon as I could, in seventh or eighth grade, since printing was faster. If nothing else, with printing one can write smaller letterforms more legibly, and smaller forms require less hand travel, thus making for faster writing.

And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?

After the last Slashdot article on handwriting, I got to thinking about my own handwriting and broke out old papers that I wrote in school. You don't get to keep any of the AP tests, but I found essays that I wrote in my AP History class. Our teacher did a fantastic job of preparing us for the exam and tried to emulate the time constraints of the AP exam for standard class essay tests....meaning you were writing furiously to get the thing done. I was astonished at how little cursive I used. When I did u

Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ? In France we learn it and then quickly forget it to only write cursive.

Writing in cursive beats writing in print only when you're using a quill or fountain pen with an inkwell, to reduce ink-splash. Writing in print is faster, more legible, environmentally friendly, and more economical.

I would start students on simple systems that they understand well: Diagram how characters interact in their favorite stories, how the timeline works, the places in the stories, and so on.

With time, I would develop it into articulations of the conceptual structure of essays and movies. I would create more and more detailed maps as times went by. Near the end, I'd have students make complex presentations of scientific and technological objects that put enormous relevant detail into compact spaces (like in mechanical blueprints, software diagrams, scientific explanations, and so on.)

Traditionally we've taught outlines and charting, but I'd step that up way more.

It's clear that most of the people posting so far are code monkeys or some other key-whackers/

Call me a Luddite, but learning to write without a computer is as important as learning to add without a computer - that is, essential.

Also, I recall a conversation about touch interfaces where/.ers were saying it was a useless fad because the keyboard and mouse were the height of usability. Teach cursive, give kids touch enabled computers, and the physical keyboard will fade into oblivion.

No problem with learning to write, but cursive is not a useful skill as far as I can tell. Printing will get you through life just fine.

If you want a real writing skill that is of some use, learn shorthand.

As far as doing away with a keyboard in favor of handwriting recognition, this is silly. Typing is far faster and easier to implement across all sorts of devices. With handwriting recognition it is inevitable that you will suffer from varying implementations of the recognition program.

The problem with cursive print is that it's an artifact from a by-gone era. Modern pens and pencils don't smudge and ink doesn't spill out of ink bottles anymore.

There's a purported speed gain from cursive, but that fails compared to the readability of block print letters compared to cursive.

(this is also being said of a person who worked at a survey research group that scanned survey data from forms filled in by pen. OCR works so much easier when letters are a more uniform size and shape.)

Smoke signalling is a dead art. No one remembers the old smoke signals used by native american tribes - not even native americans! Should we worry?

It's called progress. Those grade school teachers who insist on continuing to preach arcane methods would probably find a more efficient use of their time if they taught their students to type right after teaching them basic writing skills. I don't know many people who can spout out cursive at over 80 words per minute.

At least smoke signals were probably only used by people who understood how to use them properly, you can't say the same about cursive hand writing. That is why it is often banned from being used to sign your name on documents. People are expected to have good penmanship and frankly most people's cursive is atrocious.

With the knowledge of penmanship goes the ability to sign a pact with the Devil in one's own blood. I suppose a syringe and an empty ink cartridge would do the trick, but why bother? Whatever Life trouble you are trying to bypass with such a pact cannot seriously be as bad as the anxiety this will cause. Imagine the stress of not only owing your soul to Satan, but also to living your life in fear of litigation from Canon, Epson and the like for breaking the DMCA by refilling those cartridges.

We learn two forms of writing and two forms of measurements. When are we going to stop living in the past and do away with these old customs? Next they'll have our students churning butter forging horseshoes.

Actually churning butter and forging horseshoes would have been pretty cool to learn and far more useful then learning cursive. Eg, Churning butter would have engaged the students and also taught them a bit about where their food comes from, as whilst we use machines now, butter is still created from the same basic processes. Learning about metallurgy can be useful later in life if you choose to go down that path, boiler makers, fitters + turners are actually fairly highly sort and pretty well paid in the scheme of things. But cursive, well unless informed otherwise, I haven't come across a use for it yet.

I actually had an 8th grade metal shop class where we had a forge and were taught how to make hammers, horseshoes and various blades. It was a blast. A very popular class back in...mmmmm...about the early 1980s.

I had a third grade teacher who made me stay after school for several days so I could learn how to write a proper lower-cased "r" in cursive. Never mind that I was the best mathematician in my class; for some reason I was a terrible excuse for a human being by not being able to properly write that letter "r" in cursive.

I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. My signature on my credit card doesn't in the least resemble the cursive that we were drilled on for so long in grade school. Cursive can go away and be banished to the deepest levels of hell for as far as I am concerned.

What is this the second article about cursive writing on/. this year. Doesn't even seem very technology related not to mention it's pretty much a fluff piece. Tends to spur a bunch of mindless "cursive must die" postings. Probably the occasional moron "nine-times" will post...

Even if we want to think this is discussing technology - there is very little of general import to discuss. Is cursive still useful. Yes. Is it less necessary than before? Yes. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that less people will be doing it (or doing it well).

Now on to the fluff.

The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.

The article seems to be about excluding the teaching of handwriting. So what if this test is going to be on a computer (and I'd say that it at least could be argued that this is a *bad* thing). We can assume that the students are both being taught keyboard skills and are using keyboards at home. The writer only has an argument here is if one could be shown as a detriment to the other - and even then one would have to argue the relative merits.

"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Uh...why would this necessitate that? No answer. In fact if you read Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" you'll see just how close this parallels the fear-mongering arguments given for computers for ages - without much evidence to support it - "Oh noes if our children don't get exposed to computers by grade three they will lag behind".

Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.

Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.
No, but Id wager that most of us know what good writing is and could write well when the need arose. In the odd case where I do need to compose formally by pen my handwriting is rather good - if I do say so myself.

am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"

Well they have a point. If it is faster, cleaner and generally more efficient to type a message, why should they be required not to type but instead produce an inconsistent, generally lower quality hand written version? I suppose if your printer/computer are broken then hand writing is better but that is because you don't have the ability to create a typed copy, same as if you didn't have a pen or pencil to write out a message. Let students use the skills they have to do the best job they can and don't try to force them to learn a skill that the vast majority will inevitably learn poorly. (see previous post about cursive penmanship) Nostalgia for the old days when computers did not exist and students had no other choice is irrational.

First of all, there's the decline of paper-and-pen(cil) as a form of getting 'stuff' down. Secondly, there's the decline of actual cursive writing.

The loss of cursive seems more a sign of the social age, rather than of the technology age. We could easily lose cursive entirely, without a single computer in existence. The world could simply shift to printing, and seems to be going in that direction.

On the other hand, there are still valuable places for using a pen, and will be for some time yet. There's no better way to jot down notes in a meeting, or when brainstorming with someone else. Computers just aren't there yet.

I doubt that cursive writing will go away anymore than concept sketching will go away. The neuro-motor connection is valuable in enhancing learning and understanding. People will still write in notebooks and journals that don't need electricity. The people who can't write in the future will be the same people who can't write now; the neglected, the mentally impaired, the lazy, and those who depended on the public school system to give them the essential skills.

Especially important is the need for learning and understanding. According to John Medina in his book, "Brain Rules", concepts are learned better and more thoroughly if there is a little more effort put into the learning process. Motor memory is apparently a good adjunct to learning, especially in complex relationships.

The ability to communicate, on the other hand, is being lost at a tremendous rate. People who can't spell are trying to write about complex problems. People with bad grammar are trying to discuss important political, social and scientific issues. People who can't do basic arithmetic are trying to make sense out of figures that are twisted, distorted and under-represented in the daily media. People who can't think are still trying to vote intelligently and failing. (And,look at what happens daily on/. !)

I can use a number of computer drafting and drawing tools pretty well, but if I want to really understand something, I draw it by hand. (There is also something satisfying about the order that comes from drawing my pencil across my straight-edge, but that's something different.) I spent many hours learning to create legible printed text to COMMUNICATE ideas to others, but my own thinking is usually accompanied by either quick notes that look like shorthand, or complete notes in cursive so I can understand them later. Sometimes my slide rule is more valuable to understanding something than a calculator. Short notes and memos are still more easily written than typed, printed and delivered.

A few months ago a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that her son couldn't read an analog watch. He wears one, but it doesn't tell him the time. There is a whole level of understanding about the world that came from learning to tell time. I seemed to have a connection with the turning of the earth. I could find true North if I was lost in the woods. I could calculate height and distance without a tape measure. I could go sailing and be pretty sure I would end up where I wanted. The ability to read, write and calculate helped mankind overcome basic limitations by enhancing basic metal abilities. I am afraid the serfs of the future will be those that have been removed from the basic skills by layers of technology they use without the underlying knowledge to support it. (In my field, I have already been all but replaced by people who are called programmers, but can't do Boolean Algebra or Assembly language. A bunch of "cookbook" programmers who seem to think that writing code is more important than solving a problem. They rely, as they should, on solutions painstakingly solved by the programmers of my generation which have been combined into large complex systems and placed in books and repositories. But they couldn't reproduce the solutions if they had to start from scratch.)

As you may have guessed, I'm worried that the loss of the ability to write will diminish our ability to think and communicate. Cursive writing is only part of this process, so the loss of manual writing ability does not depend on a specific style. Cursive penmanship did give us a common ground for understanding the ideas of other people. Linguists tell us that the actual understanding of written communication is tremendously difficult, even if the communication is simple and clearly presented.

I doubt that cursive writing will go away anymore than concept sketching will go away. The neuro-motor connection is valuable in enhancing learning and understanding. People will still write in notebooks and journals that don't need electricity

The neuro-motor connection is just as present in printing as in cursive. Your argument is for the persistance of handwriting in general, not any particular mode of it, such as cursive.

A few months ago a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that her son couldn't read an analog watch. He wears one, but it doesn't tell him the time. There is a whole level of understanding about the world that came from learning to tell time.

I'm sure he can tell the time. Give him a digital watch and see. You seem to be complaining that losing a specific technique implies the loss of a general skill.

In my field, I have already been all but replaced by people who are called programmers, but can't do Boolean Algebra or Assembly language.

Why should programmers need to know assembly language, unless they are working in a field that specifically requires it? Understand the general concepts, maybe, but th

Some form of handwriting is necessary, and always will be. I view this
as non-negotiable.

I don't care if it's any particular form, as long as it's readable by others. Mine is a "joined-together printing" style,
I abandoned traditional cursive writing in my teens, but what I write is readable and gets the job done. If
Cursive is dying, let it die. Carolingian Minuscule died centuries ago and nobody misses it.

The one thing I would change is the tendency to "illiterate" handwriting. You know the type. There
has to be a better way.

When I was a teenager, lo so many years ago, I had a female friend who had really nice handwriting. On those rare occasions that my friends and I skipped school, she was always the one who'd write our "excuse" notes because her writing made for a believable note from mom. So tell me - if cursive writing is lost, who is going to write the mom notes for those poor children of the future?

A signature doesn't need to be anything readable, it just needs to be something you can duplicate yourself but is hard for others to duplicate. My signature is completely non-legible. But it looks pretty similar to other instances of my signature, and a handwriting expert could verify that, while pointing out how a forgery is different.

It doesn't matter if you're scrawling "Mickey Mouse", as long it's your signature.

And yes, the only thing we need to teach kids as far as cursive goes is their signature, however they want to write it (legible or not).

This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.

I either sign my name in cursive thus rendering it illegible, or I print it so that it can be read. For years I only signed my name in print because my cursive handwritting was so horrible. No one ever objected, or even commented on my printed signature. I only changed because I got lazy and it's easier to scribble.

Most instances where you will be physically writting something for someone else to read you are explicitely prohibited from using cursive, so I don't see the value in it anymore.

Take the time they used to spend on cursive and teach young kids how to touch type. They still don't offer touch typing classes in my old school system until High School, yet they require 5th - 8th grade students to type their homework on a computer. Touch typing is infinitely more valuable than cursive writting at this point.

Agreed. I'd even go farther than that. While I do feel that handwriting with a pen or a pencil is something that should be a part of a general eduction; it's by no means inherently necessary for literacy. Understanding letters, words, sentences and grammar, does not require that you are able to pick up a pen and draw those symbols on a piece of paper. And the idea that a certain style of handwriting is somehow vitally important seems a very quaint notion.

Learning and practicing Cursive writing has as much to do with the underlying skills of literacy, as proper Abacus operation and extensive practice solving problems with roman numerals has to do with the underlying skills of mathematics.

Completely untrue. I know several people who write exactly as in the document shown, and it is closer to cursive than calligraphy.

Hell, writing without any spelling or grammatical errors in itself is a skill -- it makes sure that you think through what you're planning on writing before putting it down on paper. But hey, no need to bother with that today, given with our ADD ridden society.

Developing good handwriting skills is part of basic communication - after all, we still take notes in notebooks, write on

Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up,

And that's part of the problem right there: how fast does she write that calligraphy? Probably not very. Cursive-supporters always say how much faster cursive is than print, but if you have to write that slowly to make it beautiful and (more importantly) legible, then it's simply not useful, except perhaps for artistic purposes.

At least bows and arrows actually still have some uses: you can shoot and kill people very silently with them, unlike guns. Cursive is about as useful in the modern world as a stylus, used for chiseling characters into stone tablets.

I have to side with the scumbags, er, lawyers on this one. If you're so dumb that you write critical information in a way that's completely illegible (i.e. cursive), then it shouldn't hold any weight in court, where someone's life or freedom could be at stake. Don't like it? Learn to write legibly (i.e., print).

No one's ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing, unless they were a calligrapher. All-caps printing is the best for legibility.